Almanc.

On Aug. 12, 1530, troops of the Holy Roman Empire restored...

In 1859 Katherine Lee Bates, who would write the poem "America the Beautiful," was born in Falmouth, Mass.

In 1898 a peace protocol ending the Spanish-American War was signed.

In 1944 Navy Lt. Joseph Kennedy Jr., eldest son of the Boston Kennedy clan, was killed when his plane exploded off the coast of Belgium in World War II.

In 1948 Oksana Kasenkina, teacher of children of Soviet diplomats in the U.S., jumped from a third-story window of the Soviet Consulate in New York to avoid being sent back the Soviet Union. (She survived the plunge and was granted U.S. asylum.)

In 1962 the Soviet Union made space history by sending a cosmonaut into orbit while another was already circling the Earth.

In 1970 President Richard Nixon signed a bill changing the 181-year-old Post Office Department to an independent agency.

In 1975 the U.S. Army disclosed that Harold Blauer, a patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, had died in 1953 during an Army-sponsored experiment with hallucinogenic drugs.

In 1981 trans-Atlantic air travel returned to normal when Canadian air traffic controllers ended a two-day boycott of flights to and from the United States.